The present application relates generally to an improved data processing apparatus and method and more specifically to mechanisms for managing data exposed during communication in order to diminish cross-context analysis.
Mobile devices interact with many services, such as base transceiver stations, near field communications devices, Bluetooth devices, web services through network connections, and the like. The number and types of these services are forever expanding and each service utilizes and collects a set of properties shared by the mobile device, such as hardware identifiers (International Mobile Station Equipment Identity (IMEI), subscriber identity module or subscriber identification module (SIM) identifiers, or the like), activity identifiers (transaction number, Web uniform resource locators (URLs), account names, emails, exchangeable image file (EXIF) formats, or the like), location identifiers (global position system (GPS) position, base transceiver station (BTS) connections, internet protocol (IP) addresses, media access control (MAC) address, network interface card (NIC) identifier, or the like), and many others.